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Indiana: “Liberal” Reed Hastings Bankrolled GOP Ban on Abortion: Shame!

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2022 //
11

Steve Hinnefeld, Indiana blogger, writes about the political donations of billionaires who claim to be “liberal Democrats.” First and worst is Reed Hastings, who is CEO of Netflix. Hastings claims to be a supporter of women’s reproductive rights, but he has funded Republicans in Indiana who passed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation. Why? Because these same conservative Republicans support charter schools. Hastings has said that he looks forward to the day when there are no more school boards, and every school is a charter. So, his passion for charter schools is stronger than his commitment to women’s reproductive rights. His allies in Indiana also loosened restrictions on guns. Michael Bloomberg, who favors abortion rights and gun control, also bankrolled the same Republicans.

Hinnefeld writes:

Indiana Republicans are spending several million dollars to protect and extend their supermajority status in the state House and Senate in Tuesday’s election. If they succeed, they may want to thank a California billionaire. One who’s usually described as a liberal Democrat.

Reed Hastings is a CEO of Netflix. Politically, he’s known for donating to Democratic politicians, nationally and in California. Netflix supports liberal causes, like abortion rights. But in Indiana, his campaign contributions go almost entirely to Republicans, who trample on his supposed principles.

It’s possible Hastings has given more money to the Indiana House and Senate GOP campaigns than any other individual in the past couple of years. Not directly. The money is funneled through a political action committee called Hoosiers for Great Public Schools. The PAC, headed by former Democratic Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, was founded in 2020 to promote charter schools.

Almost all its direct support for candidates goes to Republicans.

Hastings has given the group $1.4 million, half of it in 2020 and half this year. It also got $200,000 from John Arnold, a Texas billionaire. That’s all the money it has raised.

Hoosiers for Great Public Schools has made campaign contributions totaling $926,000. Some $400,000 went to RISE Indy, a PAC that has supported charter-friendly candidates for the Indianapolis Public Schools board. Another $100,000 went to Hoosiers for Quality Education, which promotes school choice, including vouchers and education savings accounts, and gives exclusively to Republicans.

Of the remaining $426,000 that Hoosiers for Great Public Schools contributed, nearly all went to GOP candidates and groups. It has given $190,000 to the House Republican Campaign Committee, $45,000 to the Senate Majority Campaign Committee, and $75,000 to House Speaker Todd Huston, along with four- and five-figure donations to individual Republicans.

That’s who Reed Hastings is helping elect in Indiana.

A similar story can be told about Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City. He’s known for supporting liberal causes, including gun control and abortion rights. In recent years, Bloomberg has given $550,000 to Stand for Children Indiana, which supports charter schools. All of Stand for Children’s state-level contributions this year have gone to Republicans.

There’s a cynical argument for such behavior: If you have money and you want to influence Indiana politics, you give to Republicans, because they have the power.

Peterson, CEO of Christel House International, which operates charter schools in Indianapolis, told me in 2020 that the purpose of Hoosiers for Great Public Schools was to support charter schools. But Indiana Republicans are no longer in love with charter schools. In 2021, they gave charters a modest funding increase. In 2022, they did nothing. They have moved on to favoring a more radical form of school choice in which state money “follows the child,” including to private and religious schools.

What did Hastings get with his support of the Indiana GOP? For one thing, a new law that says Hoosiers don’t need a permit to carry a handgun in public. For another, a discriminatory anti-trans law that bars transgender students from school sports teams. Republicans also tried to restrict what schools could teach about “divisive topics” – i.e., racism and slavery – but fell short.

Shame on Reed Hastings!

Shame on Michael Bloomberg!

Shame on John Arnold!

Hypocrites!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Hypocrisy, Indiana, Vouchers

Musk Suspends Twitter Account of Leader of League of Women Voters of California

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2022 //
25

A reader sent this alarming comment:

The new Twitter in the hands of Elon Musk is targeting accounts that provide unbiased information the day before the election. This is not more freedom of speech at all. I got this email notice today:

“As the Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of California, you can imagine my surprise to receive a notice that my Twitter account was suspended with no explanation or reason. That’s right. The day before a Midterm Election, I am unable to access a once critical platform to monitor and share election information.

Should I be surprised? Maybe not. I am, however, undeterred.
Because I was not provided any explanation, I am left to review what I know. The facts.
I did not violate any Twitter policies.
I did not post or share anything to justify or necessitate a suspension.
I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community. A community that has been experiencing relentless and targeted attacks for no other reason than our existence.

I am the Executive Director of an organization with the mission of:
– Empowering Voters.
– Defending Democracy.
– An organization that envisions a democracy where every person has the desire, the right, the knowledge, and the confidence to participate.

Over the weekend, 119,000 Californians accessed Voter’s Edge,* just one of the League’s unbiased election tools. In 2020, over two million voters used Voter’s Edge. These resources need full visibility. Unfettered access. At this very moment – over 4,000 people are actively using this site. Twitter’s suspension keeps me, the Executive Director, from amplifying these tools, stifling voter education.

We should all be concerned. Not for me, but for how this impedes access to democracy and silences a source of trustworthy election information. Let this be our rallying call in our resolve to stand up taller with the knowledge that we are, unquestionably, on the right side of history.


We need your support for the League’s relentless pursuit of progress. Progress Needs Protecting. Donate today and support the League’s critical role in empowering voters.

Suspended and Determined,


Stephanie Doute, CAE
Executive Director
League of Women Voters of California
Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules

*Voters Edge is a partnership of the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund and Maplight.”

Categories Accountability, Elections

Denis Smith: Take Republicans at Their Word

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2022 //
27

Denis Smith is a retired educator in Ohio. He urges voters to take Republicans at their word. When they say they will cut Social Security and Medicare, believe them. When they say they will enact a national ban on abortion, believe them. When they say they will cut taxes for big corporations, believe them.

He writes:

What Are You (We) Going to Do About It? It’s Very Simple. Take Republicans at Their Word.


According to some recent polling, Americans, concerned about rising energy and consumer prices, are expected to give control to Republicans for at least one house of Congress, most likely the House of Representatives. Yet other polls show that the Democrats are on the rebound, with many House and Senate races still too close to call.
How appolling is this? Pun.


Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post framed the ambiguous forecasting this way:

“Will an issue such as abortion motivate voters who usually skip midterms, turbocharging Democratic turnout? Will unease about the economy tip the scales toward change, boosting the GOP across the board?”


“The fact that we don’t know is unnerving…”


But while the result of the midterms might be in doubt, all of us should have no doubt about what will happen if Republicans regain control of one or both houses of Congress.


In their own words, Republicans have told us what to expect if they are victorious on November 8. We should have learned to trust them by now in looking at what they’ve said as a predictor of what they will do.

Some examples:


Social Security and Medicare. The two most popular government programs may be subject to attempts to sunset them as a way to wreak havoc on the debt ceiling. How ironic that the mastermind of the sunset plan is Florida Senator Rick Scott, who famously took the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a case involving the biggest Medicare fraud in American history that occurred during his tenure as CEO at healthcare giant Columbia/HCA.


Tax Cuts for Corporations. The GOP has promised to make permanent corporate tax levels enacted five years earlier in the first months of the Trump administration, reverting to their modus operandi of starving other programs to pay for such largesse. But to be a Republican means that you are a walking contradiction, driven to revert to past bad behavior by favoring corporations and high-income taxpayers at the expense of everyone else, including seniors.

The Post’s Jeff Stein painted this picture of what to expect in a Republican victory.


“Many economists say the GOP’s plans to expand the tax cuts flies against their promises to fight inflation and reduce the federal deficit, which have emerged as central themes of their 2022 midterm campaign rhetoric.”


Defund the IRS. Republicans plan to curtail plans for increased spending at the IRS to replace 1970s systems and increase customer service levels to avoid future backlogs on processing tax returns. Some of the new funding would go toward
hiring additional auditors to “crack down on high-income and corporate tax evaders who cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars each year.” At least 50,000 IRS staff are expected to retire soon, but the GOP has spread wild
claims that staffing levels will increase by 87,000 when in fact the funding will be needed to replace retiring staff, invest in new technology, and add more robust auditing for tax cheats, both individual and corporate.


Defund Ukraine. From the looks of it, the defense of democracy may be waning in the Republican congressional caucus. In the last month, House Leader Kevin McCarthy has warned about not giving a “blank check” in the future for more aid to
Ukraine, as have other Republicans who want more money to build a wall on the southern border. Never mind that any pullback from support for Ukraine will seriously undermine NATO, something that Donald Trump wanted to do all along by his desire back in 2018 to withdraw American membership from the North
Atlantic Alliance.

“These guys don’t get it. It’s a lot bigger than Ukraine – it’s Eastern Europe. It’s NATO. It’s real, serious, serious consequential outcomes,” said Joe Biden about GOP plans to cut support for Ukraine.

Help Big Pharma – At Your Expense. In the recently enacted Inflation Reduction
Act, you will be shocked, shocked to learn that Republicans want to help pharmaceutical companies at the expense of consumers. The Ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee has vowed to roll back caps on drug
costs allowed in the IRA “because those drug provisions are so dangerous, by discouraging investment in life-saving cures.” The legislation allows Medicare to negotiate its costs for the most expensive drugs and cap out-of-pocket costs for
seniors at $2,000 per year.

Investigations Ad Nauseum. Remember Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi? In an interview on Fox News a full year before the 2016 presidential election, House Leader Kevin McCarthy opined that “…everybody thought Hillary Clinton was
unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
You can bet your bottom dollar that if Republicans take control of Congress, we won’t have to wait long to discover probes into the Departments of Justice for alleged prosecutorial activism, Homeland Security for border issues, and for the
current president for having the same surname as Hunter Biden. You can also bet that all active congressional probes related to the January 6 insurrection will be stopped as quickly as you can say stop the steal, with the effect of absolving
possible criminal behavior on the part of some members of Congress and White House staff who may have aided and abetted the aborted coup in some fashion.


And we also need to be reminded that if the Republicans take control of the
House of Representatives, the likely new chairman of the Judiciary Committee will be Jim Jordan, the less than urbane resident of Urbana who helped to give us Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi a decade ago. His clownish antics back then may
prove to be his dress rehearsal for wielding a gavel to create more chaos and circus-like behavior in what was in another era referred to as the people’s house. In order to drive home the strong probability of chaos in the new Congress,
consider Jordan’s new 1,000 page report, where he alleges that both the FBI and the Justice Department have been politicized. Hmm, he must have never heard of William Barr. At any rate, the “report” is filled with air, containing hundreds of
pages of letters, signature pages, and only 46 pages of narrative. As is typical with Jordan, there is nothing but hot air and bluster as he wrestles in incessant witch hunts.

And last but not least:


Impeachment. Revenge. Payback. Impeachment will be on the table if the Republicans win in November. Ask Ted Cruz. Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene. For that matter, just ask the lunatic fringe that is now in control of the Republican Party. And the reason for a new impeachment? No, not for a president pressuring the Ukrainian leader to help him with collecting dirt on a political opponent, not for violation of the Emolument Clause in charging the Secret Service more than $1,600 per night for lodging in his properties, and certainly not for being central to a conspiracy for overthrowing a democratic (small d) election that led to the January 6 coup attempt at the nation’s Capitol. And the charges? Details. Details. They’ll fabricate something later because after all, the subject is revenge. Payback. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Ted Cruz said in September.
For once, Lyin’ Ted, as Trump christened him, was being straightforward.

So if you know all of this now, what are you going to do about it? In 1871, the great cartoonist Thomas Nast posed that same question.
When it comes to the Republicans’ upcoming agenda, we should believe Ted Cruz. And Kevin McCarthy. And all the rest of an anti-democracy, anti-government, election denying lunatic cult that once was identified as a responsible, conservative political party.


But perhaps the scariest part is that what has been detailed here merely represents the short list of Republican objectives in January if they win. After all, that’s what the GOP (Great Obstructionist Party), with no plan for providing principled governance yet having a detailed plan for obstruction and mayhem, is all about.


Yes, that is the GIP.


No, that’s not a typo. The GOP is also becoming known as the GIP, the Great Insurrectionist Party. When you threaten to cut Medicare and Social Security and take funds from Ukraine, a democratic country fighting for its life against an authoritarian onslaught, the result is that we’ve been GIPped.


And never forget that the leader of the rape of Ukraine is a former KGB agent who was defended by Donald Trump in 2018 at a meeting in Helsinki against allegations by 17 American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.


“No prior president has ever abased himself more
abjectly before a tyrant, the late Senator John McCain said at the time about
Trump’s performance in defending a brutal dictator who murders journalists and
jails those who dare to object to his tyranny.


In the end, if you now know about this agenda that the GOP is expected to unleash but you go ahead and vote for any Republican who denies the validity of elections and supports the authoritarianism personified by Donald Trump, you are guilty of aiding and abetting the dissolution of our democracy.


Election Day is at hand. What are you – and what are we – going to do about it? From the looks and sounds of it, we are running out of time.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Privatization, Republicans

Connecticut: The Biggest Charter Scandal Of All Time

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2022 //
12

Back in 2014, a prominent charter school leader in Connecticut resigned after it was revealed that he had been convicted of felonies many years earlier, and that he did not have a doctorate, although he claimed he did. Michael Sharpe resigned as CEO of Jumoke Academy, which ran charter schools in Connecticut and planned to expand to Louisiana.

Sharpe was part of a management organization called Family Urban Schools of Excellence or FUSE, created in 2012. The state had given millions of dollars to Jumoke to take over low-performing schools and turn them around.

The controversy over Sharpe was embarrassing to Democratic Governor Dannell Malloy, who was a cheerleader for charter schools. Malloy chose Stefan Pryor to be the State Commissioner of Education. Pryor had no experience in the classroom but was a co-founder of the no-excuses charter chain Achievement First. Charter schools in the state were allowed to have only 30% of their staff with state certification. The charter industry was strong in Connecticut due to the financial power of hedge funders and the Sackler Family (of opioid fame), which launched Conn-CAN, a charter advocacy group, which became the national 50CAN.

But the biggest scandal of all came to light in the past week, when the same Michael Sharpe was convicted of breaking into the homes of four women in 1984, kidnapping them, threatening the women with a firearm, sexually assaulting them, then stealing money and valuables.

Sharpe was convicted of kidnapping and faces a sentence of 25-100 years in prison. The statute of limitations had expired on the sexual assault charges. Sharpe’s DNA was found at the four scenes. The case was solved by the state’s cold case unit.

Back in the days of his charter fame, the Center for Education Reform identified him as a national leader.

Dr. Sharpe is president of the Connecticut Charter School Association and founding member of the Legacy Project and Family Urban Schools of Excellence (FUSE). He also sits on the boards of the National Charter School Leadership Council, St. Agnes Home, Inc., the CT Chapter of Lupus Foundation of America and Connecticut Landmarks.

Dr. Sharpe began work at Jumoke Academy in 1998 and was appointed its CEO in 2003. Under his leadership, Jumoke Academy’s middle and elementary schools were cited for three consecutive years as one of the top ten performing urban schools in the State of Connecticut.

Jumoke Academy is committed to developing the whole child, and as such, offers programs that ensure our children become competent in the arts, humanities, civic and social responsibilities, and that they understand the value and importance of good character.

In 2015, after Sharpe had resigned, civil rights attorney Wendy Lecker wrote about the strange trajectory of Jumoke Academy, FUSE, and Michael Sharpe.

Earlier this month, the Connecticut Department of Education quietly distributed a scathing investigative report on the Jumoke/FUSE charter chain, conducted by a law firm the department retained. The report reads like a manual on how to break every rule of running a non-profit organization.

The investigators found that although FUSE and Jumoke were supposed to be two separate, tax-exempt organizations, both were run by Michael Sharpe alone. FUSE, formed in 2012, never held board of directors’ meetings until after the public revelations in the spring of 2014 of Michael Sharpe’s felony record for embezzlement and falsification of his academic credentials. FUSE entered into contracts with the state to run two public schools without approval by its board. In fact, it is unclear that FUSE even had a board of directors then. Jumoke, too, played fast and loose with board meetings. Jumoke’s board gave Sharpe “unfettered control” over every aspect of the organization. Even after he left Jumoke for FUSE, Sharpe still ran Jumoke, leaving day-to-day operations to his nephew, an intern there.

Hiring and background checks were in Sharpe’s sole discretion. He placed ex-convicts in the two public schools run by Jumoke, Hartford’s Milner and Bridgeport’s Dunbar. Dunbar’s principal, brought in by Sharpe, was recently arraigned on charges of stealing more than $10,000 from the school.

Nepotism was “rampant.” Sharpe’s mother founded Jumoke. Sharpe moved from paraprofessional to CEO in 2003, with no additional training. His unqualified daughter and nephew were hired, as well as his sister.

The investigation found extreme comingling of funds and of financial and accounting activities, noting that it “would be difficult to construct a less appropriate financial arrangement between two supposedly separate organizations.”

Jumoke/FUSE used state money to engage in aggressive real estate acquisition, some not even for educational purposes, and some inexplicably purchased above its appraised value. Properties were collateral and/or were mortgaged for one another. Loan rates were excessive. To date, loans are guaranteed by FUSE, which is not operational.

Jumoke leased Sharpe part of a building who, violating the lease, sublet it and collected rent. Sharpe hired Jumoke’s facilities director’s husband to perform costly renovations on the parts of the building, his bedroom and bathroom, paid by Jumoke.

These are just some of the misdeeds that occurred without oversight by the State Board of Education or the State Department of Education. The board approved contracts to run two public schools without verifying that FUSE had no board of directors. It approved millions to be paid to FUSE/Jumoke to buy non-educational buildings, charge excessive consulting fees to public schools and engage in possibly fraudulent activities. Worse still, the board allowed Jumoke/FUSE to run Milner schoolinto the ground, jeopardizing the education of Milner’s vulnerable students.

“Dr. Sharpe’s” Linked-In profile has not been updated. It’s very impressive.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Scandals

How Elite Colleges Restricted the Number of Jewish Students

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2022 //
31

Journalist Mark Oppenheimer wrote an opinion article in the New York Times, describing the long history of antiSemitism at elite colleges. Stanford University apologized for its limited enrollment of Jews in the 1950. The apology came at a time when anti-Semitism is surging on college campuses and in society.

But restricting the number of Jews admitted to Ivy League campuses is nothing new. The top Ivy League colleges introduced strict quotas in the 1920s, fearful of being overwhelmed by Jewish students.

To anyone who understands the history of Jewish exclusion on elite campuses, the central findings of a recently released, long-awaited report from Stanford University were no shock. The report confirmed that Stanford admissions officers purposefully limited the enrollment of Jewish students in the 1950s, in part by greatly reducing the number of applicants admitted from heavily Jewish public high schools.

What’s surprising is that these discriminatory measures were, comparatively, so mild and so late to come about. Elite Northeastern schools perfected Jewish exclusion decades before Stanford got in on the act.

In the 1920s, Columbia and Harvard began seeking students from the South and West as a means of limiting the number of students from more Jewish school systems in the Northeast — the very idea of “geographical diversity” was invented to keep out Jews. From 1928 through 1938, Columbia operated Seth Low Junior College, a two-year school in Brooklyn to which Jews were relegated to keep the student body of its Manhattan campus more Protestant. And Yale decided, in 1922, to restrict Jewish enrollment, which it did until the 1960s.

Given that history, and the increase in antisemitism today in the United States, the most noteworthy aspect of the Stanford report is its long list of proposed steps for atonement, or teshuvah, to use the Hebrew word invoked by its authors. The recommendations show noble intentions, but they also reveal the limitations of official university action in fighting what may be the world’s most enduring prejudice.

How universities balance the ethnic compositions of their student bodies is an urgent question right now, as the Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments on two cases challenging affirmative action, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In several months, when it rules on the legality of their admissions practices, the court may forbid the use of race or ethnicity as considerations. If so, partisans on both sides will argue about what such a change means for “diversity,” especially the imperative to admit historically underrepresented people of color, like Black and Hispanic Americans.

These fights are nothing new. As the plaintiffs note in their brief on the Harvard case, in 1922 Harvard began to suss out which applicants were Jewish, in part by asking questions like, “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully.)” Indeed, as scholars like Jerome Karabel and Robert McCaughey haveshown, the modern college application process, from the form to the interview, were developed to weed out Jews.

Stanford adopted some of this playbook midway through the last century, so its reckoning is welcome. Some of its report’s recommended steps for atonement are symbolic, like issuing an official apology (which Stanford just did). Other steps are more concrete, like better accommodating students who need kosher food or don’t use technology on the Sabbath, and thus can’t use electronic key cards on Saturday. The report recommends paying better attention to the Jewish calendar, so the start of school does not conflict with Jewish holidays — as it did this year, when first-quarter classes started on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year….

Jewish students today are faced with a growing antisemitism that is rooted in widespread ignorance. In September, the Wellesley student newspaper published an editorial that relied on the blatantly antisemitic Mapping Project, a crude website that implies that institutions in Massachusetts including Emerson, Tufts and Harvard, a Boston-area Jewish high school, and even a public school system (Newton) are part of a web of conspiratorial Zionism. (The newspaper later said it did not “endorse” the Mapping Project.) Other institutions, like Northwestern, near Chicago, have seen incidents of swastika graffiti on their campuses.

And this year, students at a Jewish fraternity at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo told me that fellow students regularly shouted anti-Jewish slurs at them when they walked by the fraternity house. The Cal Poly students told me the hate speech is so common that they don’t even bother to report it.

College campuses are merely reflections of the national mood. The Anti-Defamation Leaguesays there was a 167 percent increase in antisemitic assaults from 2020 to 2021. But given that context, what might address the problem at schools?

Leadership, for one thing — like the kind modeled by Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, who condemned the Mapping Project as promoting antisemitism. A renewed focus on the humanities is another part of the solution. As students rush to major in subjects deemed useful — fields like economics and computer science — they are leaving history and philosophy in the dust.

As a college lecturer, most recently for 15 years at Yale, I have been surprised by the gaps in students’ historical knowledge. I’ve had students who thought that President John F. Kennedy had email and that American slavery ended in the 20th century. Some students didn’t realize Holocaust survivors still walk the earth, and many knew nothing of other genocides, from Rwanda to Cambodia.

Paradoxically, ignorance is flourishing at a time when many students seem more interested than ever in history. They are dismayed that their dormitories and classroom buildings are named after slaveholders, and they know that there is something problematic about Christopher Columbus, even if they can’t always say what. These students are ill served by curriculums that have downgraded the study of history, literature and philosophy.

Narrow-mindedness hurts us all, not only Jews. But encouraging and empowering students to discuss the history of Jews — to know anything about Jews — is the one indispensable way for schools to atone for their antisemitic past. I suspect that more Stanford students have learned about antisemitism from their school’s mea culpa than from classes they’ve taken there.

I am a graduate of Wellesley College, and I was very proud when the College’s President Paula Johnson called out the student newspaper for supporting The Mapping Project, an attempt to name and shame Jews who did not follow the newspaper’s politically correct views. Dr. Johnson did not interfere with the publication, but she said forcefully that there’s no room on campus for bigotry.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Education Reform, Higher Education, History

Iris Rotberg: The Real Scandal of Affirmative Action

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2022 //
22

The U.S. Supreme Court is pondering the fate of affirmative action, the policy in higher education that aims to increase the representation of African American and Hispanic students. Students of color have long been underrepresented in the nation’s top colleges. Affirmative action is a good faith effort to increase their numbers. Critics who oppose affirmative action want admissions to be based solely on objective measures, like SAT-ACT scores. The critics claim that white and Asian-American students are discriminated against by affirmative action and that the number of places available for them are diminished by affirmative action.

Iris Rotberg, professor of education policy at the graduate school of education and human development at George Washington University, contends in the Hechinger Report that the real scandal in admission to elite colleges is the large number of places set aside for white students.

She writes:

The main barrier is affirmative action for affluent white students, which uses up a significant number of admissions slots at many highly selective institutions. This preferential treatment constitutes a major obstacle for everyone else — including white students who are not in privileged categories.

Consider how affirmative action played out for Harvard’s class of 2023. More than 43 percent of admitted white students were in one of four categories that received preferential treatment: legacies, recruited athletes, applicants on the dean’s interest list and children of faculty and staff.

An analysis of this class shows that three-quarters of these students would not have been admitted if their applications had not received preferential treatment.

More important, that preferential treatment resulted in far fewer slots for other applicants.

In addition, Harvard gives preferential treatment to white students who attended elite private schools.

About one-third of Harvard’s students attended private high schools, compared with the national average of less than 10 percent….

While the Students for Fair Admissions case has prompted a unique analysis of Harvard’s admissions practices, the practices themselves are not unique and are consistent with practices at many other highly selective institutions, where a substantial number of white applicants receive preferential treatment.

At the same time, Black and Hispanic students continue to be substantially underrepresented at highly selective institutions. A 2017 New York Times analysis of elite colleges and universities, for example, found that Black students, who account for 15 percent of the college-age population, averaged only 9 percent of freshman enrollment at the eight Ivy League institutions; Hispanic students accounted for 22 percent of the student-age population, but averaged 15 percent of freshman enrollment.

In addition, Black and Hispanic enrollment rates are even lower when the list of institutions is expanded to include the top 100 elite colleges and universities. Black students comprised 6 percent of student enrollment and Hispanic students 13 percent at those schools.

As many studies have shown, the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students does not reflect a lack of high-achieving students, but the barriers these students face in applying to highly selective institutions — costs, insufficient counseling and the recruitment policies of the institutions themselves, for starters.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Higher Education, Race

Walton Family Foundation and PNC Bank Will Give $100 Million to Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2022 //
8

The Walton Family Foundation has poured hundreds of millions, possibly billions, into privatizing America’s schools via charter schools. It recently announced that it would add another $100 million, in alliance with the PNC bank, to enable charters to grow.

The curious aspect of Walton’s devotion to charter schools is its complete indifference to the failures, poor performance, scandals, and frequent closures of charters.

Clearly the foundation has a goal that is unrelated to performance or success. The funders criticize public schools for poor performance, but in many states, the public schools outperform the charter schools. Nonetheless, Walton keeps pouring in more money.

Its goal seems clear: not to provide better opportunities for kids, but to undermine and disrupt public schools.

If they cared about students, the Waltons would pour hundreds of millions into improving public schools, which enroll 85-90% of American students.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Public Citizen: Tax Big Oil!

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2022 //
33

Robert Weisman president of Public Citizen, explains why the price of gasoline is so high and what todo about it.

Being a multinational oil company looks like good work if you can get it:

  • Oil giant Chevron raked in $11.2 billion in profits from July through September.
  • Exxon did even better, making $19.7 billion in profits over just those three months — its most profitable quarter EVER.
  • In fact, the three top oil companies — Chevron, Exxon, and Shell — have more than tripled their profits compared to this time last year.

Again, we’re talking about profits. Not overall revenue. Sheer, unadulterated profits.

And it’s not like these companies, you know, pay Mother Nature for each barrel of oil they suck out of the ground. Or that they gave their rank-and-file workers mega-bonuses this year (unlike the excessive pay and stock options they lavish upon their executives.)

This is just plain old profiteering, pure and simple.

Big Oil is exploiting the global economic disruption and uncertainty caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine — along with recent cuts in oil production by OPEC that seem intentionally designed to destabilize things even further — to extract as much money out of all of our pockets as they can.

Meanwhile, oil prices fuel the inflation that is wreaking havoc on everyday Americans and the global economy. And the price of a gallon of gas is a major factor in how Americans vote, with Election Day right around the corner.

Today, President Biden publicly floated the idea of taxing Big Oil’s outlandish profits — something Public Citizen has been pushing the administration to do over the past year.

However, President Biden held out this kind of tax — known as a “windfall profits tax” — as a punishment only if oil companies don’t ramp up domestic production.

But ramping up domestic oil production is a bad idea for many reasons, including that more oil from U.S. lands will just be exported — as 29% of U.S. crude production currently is — denying any benefits to American consumers.

And the existential threat of climate change demands that human society move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, not that we let Big Oil extract even more oil out of the Earth and even more profits out of everyday consumers.

By the way, 80% of American voters — including 73% of Republicans — were in favor of a windfall profits tax on Big Oil even before President Biden’s announcement.

So there’s no need to manufacture counter-productive reasons to threaten to do something later that an overwhelming majority of Americans think we should be doing already.

It’s time to do some drilling of our own — deep into Big Oil’s overflowing pockets — by taxing the industry’s unjust, and unjustifiable, windfall profits and returning the money to the people.

Add your name as a citizen co-signer of our message to Congress:

American consumers need help. And somebody has to say “Enough is enough!” to Big Oil’s shameless profiteering. Pass legislation to tax the oil industry’s windfall profits now — not as a threat that will only entice them to drill more — and give that money back to hard-working, everyday Americans.

Click now to add your name.

Thanks for taking action.

For progress,

– Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen


Public Citizen | 1600 20th Street NW | Washington DC 20009 |

Categories Accountability, Economy, For-Profit

Jeanne Kaplan on the Denver Model: Charter, Choice, Chaos, and Churn

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2022 //
11

Jeanne Kaplan served two terms as an elected board member in Denver. She has watched the board’s frenIed embrace of “reform” with dismay. open the link and read the full article, which appears on her blog. I am not putting the post into italics since she uses italics.

She writes:

Reap what you sow and the chickens come home to roost. The elephant in the room.  Aphorisms appropriate to describe what is happening in public education in Denver. 

After 20 years,  more than 5  superintendents, and 11 different school boards, the results of education reform in Denver have become clear, and they aren’t pretty. After opening 72 charters in the last 20 years, 22 of which have closed, the declining enrollments in neighborhood schools have forced the prospect of school closures.  Who knew opening 26 privately run elementary charter schools in competition with district-run schools would ultimately force the district to make some hard financial decisions?  And who knew that ignoring its own 2007 data showing stagnant population growth would lead to less demand for elementary school seats in the 2020s?  Apparently, not those with the power for the last 20 years.  And, as an ironic aside, many of the same people who were the decision-makers in the past and who were unable to make substantive change then, have now decided they will somehow make these previously unattainable changes from their outside “oversight” committee, EDUCATE Denver. In fact one of the co-chairs, Rosemary Rodriguez, was a DPS board member when on March 16, 2017, a Strengthening Neighborhoods Resolution passed, stating:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a citywide committee be formed to review changing demographics and housing patterns in our city and the effect on our schools and to make recommendations on our policies around boundaries, choice, enrollment and academic programs in order to drive greater socio-economic integration in our schools.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that in the face of the sharp decline in the number of school-aged children in gentrifying neighborhoods, the committee is also charged with how to think about school choice and school consolidation to ensure that our schools are able to offer high-quality, sustainable programs for our kids.

These former school board members and former and current civic leaders have formed a “shadow school board” to evaluate and oversee the current superintendent and school board.  Why?  It appears they don’t like what they are seeing being proposed by the current superintendent. What don’t they like?  It appears they have determined the current superintendent is not committed enough to their reform agenda.  You know – the one that has been in place when they were in power, the one that has produced the biggest gaps in the nation, more segregation, and more resource inequity.

As school closures have risen to the fore this week Chalkbeat disclosed these statistics:

“Over the past 20 years, Denver Public Schools has added a lot of schools. It has added students, too — but at a much slower rate.

  • The number of public schools in Denver grew 55% between the 2001-02 and 2021-22 school years, while the number of students grew just 12%.
  • Denver went from having 132 schools serving about 72,000 students in 2001-02 to 204 schools serving nearly 89,000 students in 2021-22.
  • The number of elementary schools in Denver grew 23% over the past 20 years, while the number of students grew just 4%.”

Through expensive marketing and often false narratives, charter schools have had free reign to prey on susceptible families resulting in DPS losing 7400 elementary school students who would have otherwise most likely attended a neighborhood school. Then add in:

  • a state law that prohibits a district from shutting down low enrollment charters, 
  • a district that has ignored demographic information predicting declining enrollment, 
  • a district that employs “attendance zones” and a secretive CHOICE system to often force place students into heavily marketed, often unwanted CHARTER SCHOOLS, and 
  • a competitive financial model called Student Based Budgeting (SBB – money follows the kid) to fund schools, depending on student needs, the goal of which is to close the achievement and resource gaps.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Colorado, Competition, Corporate Reform, Denver, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Failure

Michael Hiltzik: The Republicans Have No Plan to Reduce Inflation

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2022 //
34

I have been surprised that Democrats have been so mealy-mouthed about inflation. Yes, inflation is bad, and it hurts everyone, especially those living from paycheck to paycheck. Gasoline costs more than we are used to paying (while the big gas and oil corporations are reporting record profits).

But why don’t Democrats tell the facts: Inglation is a global problem. The Ukrainian war—Putin’s war—has cut off energy supplies and raised prices. Europeans have as much inflation as we do, maybe more. There have been mass protests against inflation in other countries.

To hear Republican ads, Joe Biden is uniquely responsible for inflation. Is he causing inflation around the world or shouldn’t we be talking about the “Putin tax”?

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times reveals an important truth: the Republicans have no plan to reduce inflation. It’s their biggest issue, by far, and they have not said what they would do to curb inflation.

A look at the GOP’s election manifesto, the “Commitment to America” recently issued by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), reveals no specifics. Nor have Republican candidates done so during the multitude of appearances they’ve made on cable talk shows, despite specific and pointed questions by the hosts….

Here, for example, is Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) on Aug. 21, responding on “Meet the Press” when Chuck Todd asked, “What is the Republican plan to deal with inflation other than not supporting Joe Biden policies?”

“Well, we have a positive agenda. We have a commitment to America, and we’re going to get back to basics. … We don’t need more IRS agents. We need more Border Patrol agents. And we have a common sense plan to reduce the cost of living, to lower the cost at the pump.”

But what that “common sense plan” was, Barr didn’t disclose.

Nothing is new about this campaign technique from a minority party. It consists of repeatedly citing a problem and tying it to the party in power, assuming that voters’ impulse to “throw the bums out” will deliver electoral victory…

The “Commitment to America” also claims to have a scheme to “regain American energy independence and lower prices at the pump.” A couple of problems with that. One is that the U.S. already is energy-independent — it’s been a net exporter of oil almost every month since the last quarter of 2019 and a net exporter of natural gas since mid-2017, according to government statistics.

When McCarthy says he intends to “maximize production of reliable, American-made energy” as though that will bring prices down at the pump, he’s emitting vapor.

Additional production of energy within the U.S. will simply enter the international market, where it will be subject to global price pressures such as the supply reduction caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and by OPEC’s decision to reduce its own output. Those are the influences driving up gasoline prices here, not the pace of production from U.S. wells….

Republicans would extend the tax cuts they enacted in 2017, when they controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House — a giveaway mostly to the rich and corporations that blew a hole in the U.S. budget estimated at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion over 10 years — and one without any lasting positive effect on economic growth.

They’re talking about benefit cuts for Social Security and Medicare recipients, which would certainly make it harder for those households to make ends meet. They’ve talked about refusing to increase the government’s debt ceiling next year, using it to extract benefit cuts. As I’ve reported, this is playing with fire….

Undoubtedly, more can be done. President Biden is jawboning oil companies about their huge run-up in profits, but that’s just one industry. Corporate profits have soared since mid-2020 while average worker earnings have remained muted — a little-noticed spur to inflation.

Has the GOP embraced those ideas? Of course not — corporate managements and the big oil companies are its patrons. Instead of pointing the finger at them, Republicans complain that Social Security beneficiaries are collecting too much and the rich are staggering under the burden of the lowest marginal federal tax rates in more than half a century.

If you want to know why that party has nothing to offer on inflation, it’s because anything that really would address it in a way that helps average Americans would hurt its friends. We can’t have that, can we?

Categories Accountability, Biden, Economy, Elections, Republicans
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